Daybreak - Yoga over Python: how India’s new college curriculum rewards the easiest skills

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

India's new undergraduate framework was supposed to fix a broken system — where only 8% of graduates land jobs that match their degrees. The fix? Give students hundreds of courses to choose from, blend formal education with vocational training, and make them more employable. But when every course carries the same two credits, students do the math quickly and the easier course wins.Now universities are scrambling, edtechs are stepping in to teach core curriculum, no one's quite sure who's in charge and it's not really clear if this reform is fixing employability yet.Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Last November, something like an end-of-season sale broke out across several of Delhi University's colleges. It was a frenzy and a rush. Everyone consumed with the need to be right up in front. But it wasn't for clothes or gadgets. Instead, these students were scrambling to shop for their vocational electives on the college websites. Now, this kind of a DIY course setup isn't exactly new. It's called a cafeteria system where along with certain department and year-specific compulsory courses, students are encouraged to build their own schedules by choosing courses according to their interest. But right now, India's newest four-year undergraduate framework demands 160 to 192 credits.

These credits come from an elaborate menu of core courses, electives, vocational courses and internships. The idea, at least in theory, is to let students build their own degree. And now, with this new framework, this cafeteria has grown into something that resembles more of a buffet. But there's one category, vocational or skill enhancement courses or SEC, that's been seeing an interesting trajectory. It launched with a badge of 2022 and when it did, all seats were capped and filled on a first come first serve basis. So you can guess what kind of competition that means for over 1,000 30,000 students across 77 colleges, all of them racing to register online at a single moment in time. This is the result of the National Education Policy, or NEP, which was initially introduced in 2020.

The policy prioritizes flexibility and it's modeled after the US system with a particular goal, to blend formal education with vocational training, to make a policy. graduates more employable. That's an important goal because if you didn't know already, employability is a real problem for Indian graduates. According to India's 2025 economic survey, only about 8% of undergraduates hold jobs that actually match their qualifications. More than half of them work below their skill level. On paper, the new system offers almost unlimited choice. But that's soon turning out to be both the feature and the bug. Because when every course carries the same credits, guess what happens?

Students tend to pick the easiest ones. Abha Dev Habib, a professor at Delhi University's Miranda House College, told my colleague, Adir Krishna, that there was some interest initially. But now, students just want easy courses like yoga or physical education to just earn the credits and get done with it. To help with the process, universities have also brought in ed tech platforms, and their roles have increasingly been going beyond just providing optional skill-based courses. They are now also helping build the very curriculum for vocational courses.

All of this was supposed to help students. But with multiple players in the mix, little regulation and a shaky framework, students are chasing credits that don't ultimately serve them. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Verguise, and every day of the week, my co-host, Kinkta Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday the 13th of April. Every vocational course under India's new undergraduate framework carries the same value, two credits.

That turns course selection into a simple optimization problem. If Python programming and yoga both earn two credits, the calculation is easy. The requirement for one option is to learn how to code. The other is just stretching. It's a no-brainer that many students end up choosing well stretching. The numbers show exactly what's been happening. In 2024, nearly 16,000 students enrolled in personality development and communication courses.

Less than 4,000 students signed up for Python programming. Also, around 16,000 chose Policester. political leadership, while statistics in the programming language called R also drew fewer than 4,000 sign-ups. Now, this is not really what policy designers had in mind. See, the NEP had set an ambitious goal. By 2025, half of all students should be exposed to vocational training. And to get there, the University Grants Commission, or UGC, allowed universities to outsource

courses and let students complete up to 40% of their credits online. Students were given three options. They could opt in for courses within their own universities, register on Swayam, which is the government's online platform with over 500 courses, or go for courses from ed techs like Simply Learn and Upgrad. But like I said, students quickly found the easiest path, which is picking courses that required the least effort regardless of their career value, which meant that NEP was widening the very gap it was trying to close.

A 2025 Manpower Group survey of 3,000 companies found that 80% of Indian employers couldn't find quality talent, 80%. And the sharpest shortage was found in the IT sector, with 84% of employers reporting it as a huge issue. This, by the way, is in the same industry that absorbs over 5 lakh graduates, every year. Now, other sectors are not doing that well either. The IT sector was followed by energy and healthcare both at 81% and the industries and materials space at 79%. In fact, overall, in a global survey from this year, India ranked fifth among the countries with the most talent shortage. The most recent numbers from Siam weren't exactly very heartening either. By December 2004, the Education Ministry reported that over 30 million students had registered. But less than 20%

of that number completed the courses and a 2025 parliamentary panel found just 4% of those enrolled actually ended up earning the credits. So that's when the likes of Delhi University started to intervene with regulations. For example, they started capping how many students could study each course. But the thing is, the universities themselves are still struggling with the university. this kind of integration. A techs were supposed to be filling the gap. But those haven't been too successful either. More on this in the next segment.

Simply Learn is an online certification platform which has now been approved for credit bearing courses. It has traditionally worked with universities to offer optional certifications, but that relationship is now changing. Krishna Kumar, the CEO of Simply Learn, told Atul that over the past six to eight months, institutions have been approaching the company to teach core parts of their curriculum. This has never happened before. Around eight institutions have approached the platform to handle subjects like AI, data science and analytics.

Most are private universities and deemed to be institutions, which are basically institutions that are bigger than colleges but smaller than traditional universities, like lovely professional university or K. Ramakrishan College of Technology and Nita Minakshi Institute of Technology. A professor from Nite, for example, actually confirmed to us that the college is outsourcing up to 10% of its total degree credits to ed tech platforms. Now, for the universities and colleges, the UGC is what sets the framework. The credits to ours equation is pretty straightforward. But on platforms like Simply Learn, there's no regulator to assign credits, especially for courses that are not tied to the university.

Krishna Kumar told us that there's no transparent. framework for how many credits a course should carry. If the platforms can just choose, they'll just put in any number. He explained that in the US at least, independent bodies are what handled this. But here, ultimately, the responsibility falls on universities. But many professors say that institutions still haven't figured out how vocational education should fit into academic programs in the first place. Stay tuned. Professors aren't exactly convinced that the merging of formal and vocational education is working. A member of the Delhi University Academy Council told us that the pool of skill enhancement

courses show a kind of lack of understanding of what skills actually are. He explained that really no meaningful skill can be learned in isolation from the student's core discipline. For example, if you were doing a course in mass media or mass communication, your skill enhancement courses could be about filmmaking or photography. or graphic design. As a student, you get to decide what you're interested in, but they still all fit with the core discipline,

which is mass communication or mass media. And that's how it used to be. Skill enhancement courses used to be tied to a student's main subject. But now, the options range from dairy farming to cyber forensics to graphic design, and all of them carry the same weight, requiring just eight credits over four years. And most classes need only about 15 hours of teaching, and they barely go beyond introductory content.

Abha Dave Habib, the professor from Miranda House I mentioned earlier, explained that you can't have a Python course be the exact same for a physics student and a Sanskrit student, because the physics student would need to go more in depth since they probably already have a handle on the basics. But unfortunately, that's not the case. The thing is, even though the NEP is modeled after U.S. curriculum, it works differently over there. Credits vary by subject and over there Python might carry more of them than yoga. Under NEPIDO, everything is treated equally. What also doesn't help is that the government has done little beyond urging universities

to add vocational courses. It hasn't provided funding for the support infrastructure these courses need, like computer labs, for example, or even specialized staff and proper oversight. And this has resulted in both teachers and students treating many of these vocations. educational electives is just a box to tick. And universities are responding by capping enrollments in popular courses. But the thing is, the underlying incentives themselves haven't really changed. So the government may eventually claim to have successfully integrated formal education with vocational training.

But it's hard to see how exactly 15 hours of yoga each semester can actually solve the country's employability crisis. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien. Thank you.